Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Daniel Jonah Goldhagen | Extraordinary! A novel approach to the Holocaust brings to the forum a whole new set of interpretations of this fateful event.

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	Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Vintage, 1997 - 656 pages average customer review:based on 201 reviews view larger image
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This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion.

"Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books

"The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

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A Study That Can't Be Ignored -- but the Kindle Version Needs Work

"Hitler's Willing Executioners" is without doubt a highly important work that no one wishing to understand 20th-century history can afford to ignore. In this review, however, I will focus on the Kindle version.

The Kindle version has significant problems. First, the footnotes are not linked (i.e., you can't click on a footnote number and be taken to it from the main text). Every serious non-fiction book really should have linked footnotes. Second, the conversion to ebook form is one of the worst I've ever seen. It appears that somebody scanned the book and then just put it on the market without even glancing at the text. Numerals are sometimes in superscript, sometimes in subscript; frequently the number 1 is a capital I; almost every occurrence of footnote 11 is a quotation mark. Sometimes superscript and in-line digits appear within the same number (such as years). This may sound like a small matter, but believe me, it becomes extremely distracting after about 200 pages without a let-up.

Even so, I'm very glad that this book is available in a Kindle version (especially considering that it's over 10 years old). I just hope that the publisher will clean it up soon.

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Extraordinary! A novel approach to the Holocaust brings to the forum a whole new set of interpretations of this fateful event.

This book explains how most adult Germans of the Nazi era (1930's and 1940's)were capable of embarking themselves into the genocidal project that with time became known as the Holocaust.

Antisemitism was the precursor of genocide. The author mentions how Christianity, sometimes, have been associated with hate against the Jews (portraying them as the killers of Christ and resenting the Jews' "rejection" of Christianity as the True Faith). Later on in History (mainly during the 19th century), antisemitism gained a pseudo scientific status when Jews were labeled a distinct Race (and an evil and inferior one at that).This new "approach" prevented even converted Jews from escaping persecution.

Several European countries did embrace antisemitism; in Germany it became pervasive, infecting all strata of the German society. This widespread German antisemitism defied reason and moderation and it allowed Hitler's genocidal dreams to become a reality. Because a great deal of Germans were willing to torture and kill Jews, Hitler was able to slaughter six million Jews.

The author is very methodical while pressing his points.I learned a great deal from this book. The only reason I did not give this book five stars is my impression that the author could have accomplished the same results with a hundred or one hundred and fifty pages less. Other than that, it is required reading for any one interested in World War Two.

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